Amazon indigenous group girds itself to hold ancestral lands

Songs recall colonial brutality

After the young men put their hands in the gloves, they sing and dance late into the night, beating out rhythms with chocalhos, a rattle filled with forest seeds that is strapped to their legs. The men say that getting immersed in the rhythm is the only way of alleviating the pain. As the night progresses, young women join the dance.

No one in the village could literally translate the traditional songs for the Mongabay reporting team, but they told us that the words merge myth and historical fact. One myth concerns the origin of the tucandeira ant itself: “In this myth, the ant represents woman [playing the role] of mother, and as a force that can transform, just as death transforms humankind into nature,” explained anthropologist Gabriel Alvarez, who has studied the Sateré.

One recurring historical theme is the Cabanagem, a huge revolt in the Amazon basin in the 1830s when indigenous groups, blacks and traditional riverine communities rose against the white minority that was oppressing and exploiting them. The revolt was named after a common trait shared by all the impoverished and exploited rebels – they lived in simple shacks (cabanas) made of mud and covered in straw. The revolt, against the Portuguese Empire and the local elite that enjoyed colonial privileges, was an attempt to get better living conditions and to reduce the tyranny of the regional government of Grão-Pará. The revolt was put down brutally by the imperial government. Ravaged by outbreaks of smallpox, cholera and beriberi, the rebels suffered greatly, with at least a third of the population of Grão-Pará dying. The Sateré, who participated enthusiastically in the rebellion, still recall the conflict frequently.

Another song topic recounts indigenous resistance to colonialism. According to Gabriel Alvarez, some lyrics tell how Portuguese rulers took indigenous children away from their villages, promising to educate them, but instead placed them in sacks and threw them in a river to drown. Other songs tell how children were pressed into forced labor or prostitution, said the anthropologist.

Still another song tells how the Portuguese arrived with a boatload of goods, but demanded the soles of the feet of their tuxaua (the indigenous chief) in payment so that he could no longer walk unaided. The anthropologist sees this, along with other allegorical songs, as a criticism and remembrance of the way indigenous people have been persecuted, annihilated and assimilated into the “white” world — and as a means of steeling themselves to unite and resist.

Benito Miquiles, a Sateré man who is both a university graduate and a Waumat rite of passage participant. Image by Matheus Manfredini

Building defiance

The Mongabay team travelled to Fortaleza at the invitation of Benito Miquiles, a 25-year old Sateré who has lived for the last few years in the river port town of Parintins where he earned a degree in indigenous culture at the local university.

The Waumat ritual that we viewed was Benito’s fifteenth; he wants to complete the required 20 times as quickly as possible. Only then, he said, will he be ready to start training to become a tuxaua, eventually taking over from his father, Bernadino, a widely respected Sateré leader. “It is my destiny to become a tuxaua,” Benito told us.

“I gain much wisdom from the elders in this ritual. Just as you learn sociology, philosophy, and so on, at school, it’s the same with us. Through this ritual we receive our education,” Benito explained. He added that Waumat not only fosters courage and resistance, but also allows participants to interact in a complex symbolic cultural universe and come out of it transformed.

Dico, the tuxaua of Fortaleza village, laments that — after the arrival of Christianity, and particularly the arrival of evangelical missionaries — many communities stopped practicing Waumat. In the neighboring village of Vila Nova, for example, Baptist pastor Maxiko Miqueles denigrated the rite: “The Sateré are committing a sin by believing that they can communicate with their ancestors through a pagan practice,” he said.

However, many young Sateré countered that they continue to benefit greatly from the rite. “At the moment in which we place our hand [in the glove], we get that profound feeling of becoming stronger. We go through a lot of pain and we endure it to show that we are strong enough for the struggle,” explained Benito, whose only outward sign of the anguish he was feeling during the ritual was a clenching of the jaw and vacant eyes, as if he’d been transported elsewhere.

This story first appeared on Mongabay

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